I was contracted to work in the Hille furniture factory at Haverhill in Suffolk in 1970.This was at a time when the production facilities were being enlarged necessitating reorganisation of the factory.
I chose to work in what I thought were the least attractive conditions, the metal polishing room. There were roughly 6 to 8 working stations in the workshop. My intention was to break into communication with the workers and then to extend my contacts across the factory floor. I did manage

And for today... nothing, 1972
And for today... nothing is the title of an action performed in Part 2 of the exhibition A Survey of the Avant Garde in Britain curated by Rosetta Brooks at Gallery House London in August 1972.
Two previous titles I had appropriated for performances invoked the Labour Party slogan 'You Know It Makes Sense' used in the election of the 18th of June 1970. I was interested in propaganda language used by political parties, in the ways that

Please go to the Text section for further documentation.
Tate archive: outlne of performance
You Know It Makes Sense
(With reference to Allegations Made by the Irish Times Against the British Army in Ulster Concerning Torture), 1972 with Everelde Berry, Deborah Brisley, Janet Deuters and Michael Melluish.
Photographer: Aleric Aldred
In March 1972, the then British Prime Minister, Edward Heath, claimed to have banned notorious torture methods which were later condemned

Artist as Whore 1972
Artist as Whore took place at Gallery House London in December before Xmas in 1972.
The subject is obvious in the title. Discordancy of the word 'whore' leads the way.
I took the image of whore as an analogy for the role of the artist as a complicit partner in the market place with its echoes of feudal accumulation.
This reveals a further fold; the artist, detached from the market place, has no one place to go or to be.
The event

Stuart Brisley made these three works during 1981, although they concern events from three different dates during the 1970s. They were conceived as works in their own right and are not simply documentations of performances. Brisley is suspicious of documentation; he feels that it can invest an action with an inaccurate, sometimes mythical status. He is anxious however to have some record which amplifies the unique status of the brief existence of an event and gives it more than temporary form.

Click here to watch the video
Click here to listen to Stuart Brisley in conversation with Catherine Wood, Curator of Contemporary Art & Performance about his work.7 October 2011
The film Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Makes Free) was conceived after the performance 'And For Today... Nothing' which took place at Gallery House Goethe Institute in London in 1972. The words Arbeit Macht Frei were wrought in iron and placed on or

Tate archive: Hand written proposal
The performance 10 Days happened during Brisley‘s DAAD artist exchange to Berlin. During this performance, which took place between 21 to 31 December 1973, Brisley offered the food he would usually consume to his audience, essentially living without any source of food for the whole 10-day duration of the performance.
Brisley recreated the performance at the Acme Gallery in London

I first used newspapers in 1969 as part of the process of thinking about the 'everyday'.
Bath Works, Berlin 1974 continues this exploration further - the head as a sensory receptacle is masked by the day's interpretation of the news. Like an ideological imperative applied to the head.
It was made in private - the idea being that the photograph would become the work in public.
The photographer was a friend and collaborator, Leslie Haslam, also a long term resident in

Please see the text section for letter from Jozef Szajna, director of Teatr Studio, 1975.
Please see the text section for Stuart Brisley's text, 'The Photographer and the Performer' from 'Live Art on Camera: Performance and Photography' by Alice Maude-Roxby, John Hansard Gallery 2007.
Moments of Decision /Indecision
Teatr Studio, Palac Kultury i Nauki, Warsaw, 1975.
I was offered a DAAD fellowship to live and work in West Berlin for a year in 1973/74.

Please go to the text section for school childrens' notes and letters to Stuart Brisley on this work.
Public informal discussions
Private formal construction of structure
Actions in public with structure in various states of completion
Collaboration through discourse
An everyday thought with subjective implications: make your own prison. ( I built a box the size of the limits of my own body)
Final outcome: Breakout
As with some other works

Please go to the Text section for:
- Stuart Brisley's statement in the catalogue for Arte Inglese Oggi, November 1975;
- A text by Sharon Behr 1976.
Arte Inglese Oggi 1960-76, organised by the British Council and the Comune di Milano, took place at the Palazzo Reale and nearby venues between February and May 1976. It presented to the Italian public an overview of the art being made in Britain at the time, and included sections on Painting, Sculpture, “Alternative

Tate Archive
Peterlee Archive in Durham County Council
Click here for information on Peterlee
In 1975, Artist Placement Group approached new towns to set up the terms for artists to propose projects. The Development Corporation of Peterlee New Town responded and in 1976, Stuart Brisley was appointed. The project contained three distinct parts: ▪ to develop an ongoing process of collecting and disseminating information under the

Performance duration: 3 days
This work took place over three days on the quayside of lake Constance in Bregenz. I made five wooden frames the size of my body with outstretched arms. Clear polythene was stretched across two of the frames to prevent paint leaking on to the quay. Black nylon cord was tied to form a cross shape on each frame. The frames were laid out in a line stretching towards the lake.
I placed my body under the cord under he first frame, then stretched to express the

Performance duration: 14 days
Digging a hole in which to make a place to live for two weeks, then leaving the evidence as an installation as echo. Choice of site was fortuitous as the rubble from the Second World War was deposited there, eventually forming the base for a park. In digging I came across all manner of detritus, including fractured parts of human bones, verified by a doctor friend visiting the site. Digging was to be continued for two weeks.
As the hole progressed,

The action took place as part of the Vienna Performance Festival in 1978.
I made 13 actions each lasting one hour i.e hours 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21, 23. It took place in the evening and through the night. The space was open during the 24 hours. In the intermediate hours 2, 4, 6, etc the space was open for viewing. A path was used dissecting the space to the wall opposite. Black and white pigment was laid out in two piles at the centre of the room and a taut black

At the Acme Gallery in London, Brisley performed 180 Hours Work for Two People (1978). He took both roles: “B”, a vocal bureaucrat inhabiting the upstairs part of the gallery, carefully preserving his urine and excrement and hanging it in a hole in the floor, above “A” who lives downstairs, a man-­off­-the­-street as active as “B” was vocal, but who says nothing. When “A” “disappeared”, “B” began playing his

In this performance, in an abandoned warehouse in Dublin, Brisley suspended from the ceiling a dire construction fashioned out of chairs, paint and bags of sand. Moving along a network of cables spanning the space, the artist repeatedly attempted to engage this intractable object.

3 day and night continuous performance. Nomadic condition. Triangular structure for sleeping in - transported by the figure in and around the entrance to the Musee d'art Moderne... Communications with the homeless who spent the nights in the covered section of the entrance among the columns.Little or no contact with the visitors to the exhibition during the day.
Stuart Brisley 2012
For this performance Brisley constructed a small shelter in which he could sleep and that he could carry

Between
de Appel, 1979
Between was based on Carl Jung's idea of the 4 stages of human life.
1. Childhood
2. Adolescence and early adulthood
3. Adulthood and mid life, between 35-50 years of age
4. Maturity, old age, alignment of the self and the anticipation of death
Two participants, Iain Robertson, aged 24 (in the 2nd stage of life), and the other, Stuart Brisley, 48 (3rd stage of life).
One half the age of the other, and the other double the age of the